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This paper argues that the texts surviving from the Old English period do not reflect the spoken language of the bulk of the population under Anglo-Saxon elite domination. While the Old English written documents suggest that the language was kept remarkably unchanged, i.e. was strongly monitored during the long OE period (some 500 years!), the spoken and "real Old English" is likely to have been very different and much more of the type of Middle English than the written texts. "Real Old Engish", i.e. of course only appeared in writing after the Norman Conquest. Middle English is therefore claimed to have begun with the 'late British' speaking shifters to Old English. The shift patterns must have differed in the various part of the island of Britain, as the shifters became exposed to further language contact with the Old Norse adstrate in the Danelaw areas and the Norman superstrate particularly in the South East, the South West having been least exposed to language contact after the original shift from 'Late British' to Old English. This explains why the North was historically the most innovative zone. This also explains the conservatism of the present day dialects in the South West. It is high time that historical linguists acknowledge the arcane character of the Old English written texts.
Der gemeinsame Wandel der inselkeltischen Sprachen wie auch des Englischen vom vorwiegend synthetischen Typus zum vorwiegend analytischen Typus läßt sich vermutlich auf einen ca. 1500 Jahre dauernden intensiven Sprachenkontakt zwischen diesen Sprachen zurückführen. Heute ist das Englische die analytischste Sprache der Britischen Inseln und Irlands, gefolgt vom Walisischen, Bretonischen und Irischen. Letzteres ist von den genannten Sprachen noch am weitesten morphologisch komplex.
This article addresses problems of authorship and creative authority in popular music, in particular in view of a pervasive split between modes of aesthetic production (involving modernist assemblage, multiple authorship, and the late capitalist logic of major label policies) and modes of aesthetic reception (which tend to take popular music as the organic output of individual performers). While rock musicians have attempted to come to terms with this phenomenon by either performing a ‘Romantic’ sense of authenticity (basically by importing folk values to the production process) or ‘Modernist authenticity’ (by highlighting experimen- tation and alienation), Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett, creators of Gorillaz, found a third way which ingeniously allows them to do both. By creating a virtual rock band, and by hiding their own media personalities behind those of their virtual alter egos, they brought themselves into a position which allows them to produce ‘sincere’ popular music which ‘playfully’ stages the absurdities of major label music business while very successfully operating within its very confines.
This essay revisits Ian McEwan’s extremely successful novel Saturday, and interrogates its exemplary assessment of the British cultural climate after 9/11. The particular focus is on McEwan’s extensive recourse to the writings of Matthew Arnold, whose melancholy outlook on culture and anarchy McEwan basically translates into the 21st century without much ideological fraction. This relapse into Victorian liberal humanism as consolation for a Western world besieged by the contingencies of terrorism is extremely problematic. Not only does it wilfully ignore the transcultural realities of modern Britain, it also promotes an ahistorical and apolitical mode of critical inquiry which may be called reductive at best in view of the global challenges that the novel addresses.
In this article, it will be argued that the concept of functional layering – an extension of Hopper’s (1991) concept of layering – can be fruitfully applied to understand the mechanisms behind the sometimes large and messy looking synchronic picture of diverse meanings which one and the same construction can fulfill at a particular point in time. The concept will be used to account for the meaning spectrum of the present-day English progressive, which, it will be argued, no monosemic approach to date can account for. Taking a look at the diachrony of the construction will help to reveal that the various “exceptions” found in the use of the progressive can be understood as reflections of different stages in its development. Older, less grammaticalized or less well-defined usage patterns thus often survive in certain restricted niches next to the newer, more grammaticalized or more clear-cut functions, representing different diachronic layers. In addition to this diachronic motivation for synchronic meaning variety, the article will also address the crucial question of how a present-day hearer of a progressive form is able to decode the specific meaning intended by the speaker based on contextual clues. The article ends with some suggestions for further applications of the concept of functional layering.
Deep into the second half of the twentieth century the traditionalist definition of India as a country of villages remained dominant in official political rhetoric as well as cultural production. In the past two decades or so, this ruralist paradigm has been effectively superseded by a metropolitan imaginary in which the modern, globalised megacity increasingly functions as representative of India as a whole. Has the village, then, entirely vanished from the cultural imaginary in contemporary India? Addressing economic practices from upper-class consumerism to working-class family support strategies, this paper attempts to trace how ‘the village’ resurfaces or survives as a cultural reference point in the midst of the urban.